GOP Gets Tricked on the Independents

RUSH: St. Louis, this is Peter. Great to have you on the program, Peter. Hi.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Are you there?

RUSH: Yeah, right here. I just said hi.

CALLER: 1992 mega dittos, Rush.

RUSH: Thank you very much.

CALLER: So I called to just let you know that I think the Republicans got it wrong. That they’re looking at the independents as if we’re moderates, when in fact we’re not. We might be made up of part moderate, but I myself was a Republican, but no longer.

RUSH: You know, this is a good point. I know exactly what Peter is saying here. The Republicans are worried more about independents than they are their own voters. I guess they just take for granted their own voters are gonna vote for ’em, despite what’s happened in the last two presidential races when a lot of Republican voters have not voted, they’ve stayed home. I don’t know how else to explain this. I could use names. That might make the point even better, but I don’t want to use names because it’s not really the point. I don’t want people to lose focus on the issue by getting caught up in personality.

But there are people whose names you see, faces you see every day on TV that think the Republicans just have to shut up because if they oppose anything, it’s gonna anger the independents. And thus they believe the independents are the reason you win or lose. And his point is, you know, there’s a lot of independents out here that are former Republicans. We’re just fed up with the party. We quit. We’re not loyal. We’re not gonna identify ourselves as Republicans, but we’re not moderates. But the party may think they all are, is the point, and that would affect the way they support them.

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RUSH: No, the key to it is that the Republican establishment obviously thinks independents are not Republicans. Now, you might think, “Well, of course they’re not, Rush! They’re calling themselves ‘independents.’ Of course they’re not Republicans.” Ah, ah, ah, ah. You have got to play that out and follow that through. If the Republican establishment believes that the independents are not Republicans, then do they believe that they tend more toward Democrat? Do they tend toward Republican? Have they studied them?

Do they know who the independents are? Do they know that the independents are made up in large part of disaffected Republicans, fed up and simply do not want to be identified with an (R) in their voter registration? Or do they think the independents are largely Democrats? Okay, well, no matter how you answer this, the net result is the Republican Party believes that in order to get elected, it cannot be the Republican Party.

If they’re gonna run around and say, “We can’t oppose Obama. It’ll upset the independents! No, we can’t stop the Iran deal. It’ll upset the independents! No, we can’t really do anything about Obamacare, because we can’t stop it, and we can’t override a veto — and just to put up the fight would irritate the independents,” then they obviously think the independents are not Republicans. And yet if they think they cannot win without the independents, and therefore they have to appeal to them, what a great trick somebody has played.

“Republicans, the only way you can win is to not be Republican.”

And by God, the Republicans are following right along!

They’re for amnesty. They’re echoing the Democrat Party on a lot of things under the premise that this is the only way they can win. I’ve always thought this independent game, this notion that you can’t win the White House without a majority of the independents has always been a trick, and I’ve explained that to you countless times, because what it does is when every Republican consultant believes that, every Republican campaign ends up being targeted at 20% of the population rather than all of it.

And there’s no way you can win by campaigning for 20% of the population and their votes. So it really does matter who the Republican Party thinks independents are. Because if it is resulting in the Republican Party telling itself, “You know, we can’t win being Republican. We’ve either gotta mask our Republicanism or ignore it or hide it,” what does that mean? That means, “We’ve got to somehow shut up the Tea Party! Oh, my God, the Tea Party gonna kill us. The Tea Party’s gonna let everybody know that — oh, God! — we’re conservative Republicans! Oh, no.”

So they have to disavow the Tea Party and they have to disavow conservatism because their primary objective is to tell non-Republican voters, “Hey, we’re not Republicans, really. We’re not what you think of Republicans.” I mean, this is a doozy of a trick that they have fallen for.